BRCC payroll error costs teachers during holidays

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BATON ROUGE- Teachers at Baton Rouge Community College got a rude awakening today, when the school's administration informed them they'd been overpaid and would have pay back the error.

Nearly 100 teachers were included in the accounting mistake, which average about $5,000 in over payments over half the year.

"My first thought was, you're telling us at Christmas time... My second thought was, not too surprising, we've had a lot of changes to how payroll was done over the past year," said KJ Lodrigue, a Biology teacher at the school.

In fact, teachers noticed the error earlier in the year and tried to correct it with the school.

"We even had a lot of faculty go to HR and say, 'I think I'm being overpaid,' and HR sat with them and said, 'no this is correct, this what we should be paying you,'" said Lodrigue.

"We were made aware of that today," said school spokeperson Steve Mitchell. "That's part of one of the specific things we're investigating, why that wasn't corrected at the time. That's a primary purpose of the investigation to find out what went wrong there and why even upon reporting it, it wasn't corrected."

Now the school says they'll work individually with teachers to work out a repayment process, but says state law mandates the school recoup the over payments.

"You walk around campus and there's faculty at the point of tears," said Lodrigue. "Students are upset because faculty they care about that works with them are basically being told you're going to have a very short period to pay back an average of $5000."